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The Yiddish policeman's union

In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.

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In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.

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Poetic fusion of genre and jewish culture, ELC Review

I know little about jewish culture, especially the Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe, so I cannot critically judge how well Chabon did on his jewish details and references. But I think his language is rich and beautiful, and his use of genre was both sophisticated and accessible to the unsophisticated....再读一些...

I know little about jewish culture, especially the Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe, so I cannot critically judge how well Chabon did on his jewish details and references. But I think his language is rich and beautiful, and his use of genre was both sophisticated and accessible to the unsophisticated. In his earlier book on Cavilier and Clay, he did a good job playing in a literary way with the genre of superhero stories and comic books. Here, he does the same for noir fiction. Well done.

Quick situation summary: Chabon offers an alternative history where the Israelis lost the 1948 war for independence. In its aftermath, several million jews needed a place to live, so the United States had created a special administrative district in Alaska where they, as non-citizens, could live in refugee camps until they could find a place to live. The action of the story takes place in the final days of the district, before it reverts back to US control and its denizens have to find a country into which they can emigrate.

Quick plot summary: The main character, Detective Landsman, works for the homicide unit of the district police. His personal life is a wreck, and his wife has left him. He starts investigating a murder case that keeps getting more complicated and involves more people as the story goes along.

When I say "beauty of prose," here is what I mean. I have done quite a bit of research on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. I know the book inside and out. But I am not under any illusions about the beauty of the prose: Confederacy is often barely passable as prose. In contrast, Yiddish Policeman's Union sings with the music of its words, both in the closeup sense of their phonemes and in the distant sense of their connotations and interwoven chords of meaning. I listened to the audio version, and I simply enjoyed listening to the beauty of the sentences, just as I enjoyed the sentence-level of Joyce's Ulysses. Some Amazon reviews have complained that the language is too ornate, so your milage may vary.

I am not sure about the meaning of the text as a whole, and I would like to read more criticism to understand better what Chabon was driving at, so in that regard, it is possible in the end that Confederacy has the edge on this text in its handling of bigger ideas. In MLA Bibliography, there are only a few essays that interpret this book. Get to work, English majors.

Dateline: December, 2013: I was reading Chabon's review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in the New York Review of Books. In it, he explains that a cornerstone of Pynchon's body of work is that any deterministic, authoritarian systems of control are associated with Anti-Life. Chabon sees Pynchon's goal as showing that life cannot be contained by such systems. His crazy narratives show the chaos of life escaping the clutches of control. If we turn around and apply those observations to the present text, the crazy weaving together of Landsman and Berko are on the side of Life, and the systems of the American authorities and the messianic Jews are both on the side of Anti-Life.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Because I have been reading evolutionary literary criticism, it has occurred to me that I should be trying to apply it at every turn. So here is my attempt with this text.

Evolutionary Literary Theory Boilerplate

For theory, I will be drawing primarily on the collection "The Literary Animal" (abbreviated below as TLA) edited by Gottschall, Gottschall's own book, "The Storytelling Animal" (TSA), and the William Flesch book "Comeuppance." One problem with offering an evolutionary interpretation of a text is that there are three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC). So we need to comment on the story's relationship to each of the three versions.

The first (ELC1) simply observes that humans are fascinated by stories featuring survival, social status, and mating themes (boy loses girl, maiden guarded by dragon, boy hangs from cliff, etc.). To be an effective story, a page-turner, the text should play out a behavioral strategy that would be valid from an evolutionary point of view. So we might learn as much about evolutionarily valid strategies from the text as we learn about the text from evolutionary theory. And we could profitably study the common themes of a genre, not just this particular text. In TLA, this line is promoted by McEwan, Nettle, Carroll, Nordlund, Fox, Gottschall himself, Kruger, and Salmon.

"Comeuppance" by Flesch critiques the above argument that we are fascinated by mundane evolutionary strategies. He points out that human behavior is driven by a struggle between individual selection and group selection. Human societies need some members who are willing to punish the selfish, even at a cost to themselves, actions which are called altruistic punishment. According to this theory, seeing evil punished at great cost is a behavior that generates enormous emotional interest and is a large factor in stories we deeply value.

The second version (ELC2) is to emphasize that storytelling itself is an adaptation, and that humans are wired to enjoy and transmit stories. In TLA, this position is presented by Boyd and Sugiyama, and it is the thesis of Gottschall's own book, TSA. Flesch would argue that the hard wiring runs through the part of the brain tuned to altruistic punishment.

ELC2 also allows one to explore the degree to which the author intentionally (or perhaps unintentionally) tries to conform to or challenge the expectations of a genre. In other words, how good of a job did the author do telling the tale, and how was it received by the readers or listeners?

The third version (ELC3) is that stories have been a method of storing cultural information throughout human history, and as such, they preserve cultural entities and allow for cultural evolution. Stories here include religious texts and political histories. This position is argued by David Sloan Wilson's essay in TLA and by Gottschall in TSA to a limited degree. Wilson's position allows for a sort of historicism or ideological critique of a text, in which the subtext of a narrative or of its reception might be to support the current cultural status quo or to advocate for a different cultural state. So the cultural meaning of a text might be quite different from what the author had in mind when it was written. Culturally powerful factions within a society may promote a story that justifies their own hegemony. So one can ask: what cultural norms are promoted by this text, even if indirectly?

ELC3 should also encompass the use of a storytelling tradition to indicate group membership. Knowledge of a canon of stories, or the proper form of a storytelling genre, can act as the sign of worthiness for membership as much as any other demonstration of mastery of a behavior or belief system. To be knowledgable about a large canon of stories, whether it is Proust's In Search of Lost Time or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you must have the ability and the inner motivation to learn the details, a motivation often achieved by accepting the value system of a group that considers them worth knowing. Establishing one's worthiness for membership in any group or social class potentially allows one to share in the tangible benefits of the group. For example, the shipwrecked Odysseus was treated as noble because he demonstrated mastery of a particular behavior—an aristocratic form of address. So one can ask the question: does appreciation of this text denote membership within a human social group?

Chabon via ELC1

As this book is an example of noir fiction, it is useful to analyze the ELC1 aspects of the genre of noir fiction. What are the characteristics of the noir hero? Warning: I am actually not an expert in the genre of noir detective fiction, so the description below is what I have gathered second-hand, and someone more familiar with the genre could correct my misconceptions.

In the theoretical framework of altruistic punishment, the noir detective is an exemplary altruistic punisher. Sometimes at great risk to self, he or she exposes and punishes defectors from the common good. In Flesch's list of protagonists who are altruistic punishers, he states, "almost any modern detective, and almost any modern superhero" (p. 52). Michelle Robinson quotes Robert Skinner to the effect that the detective hero is an outsider who attempts to correct an injustice that the law is incapable of rectifying. That is, the hero is outside because he or she has paid the costs and has not compromised with and been coopted by a system with structural injustice. The hero's typical sympathy for the downtrodden is an alignment with the innocent against the villain.

The noir hero is a bit of a fatalist: he or she knows failure is entirely likely (evolutionarily speaking, that he or she will not get the desirable mate or the high status within the community). But the hero is brave and is willing to live by an honor code, even if the world will not then give the hero honor for doing so. An honor code is a public signal of irrational altruism. In this way, the hero is a modern knight's errand, bravely fighting for something good, even if he or she is not the idealist of Don Quixote. The generic hard-boiled detective shares the attitude of George Bernard Shaw's character Captain Bluntschli from the play "Arms and the Man." Bluntschli was outwardly very cynical about how the world works, but in the end he is revealed as a closet idealist.

If the hero is male, there is typically a female lead also, and she tends to be tough and not necessarily loyal to the hero. She tends to be sexually attractive, and capable of using her sexuality to further her interests. Her status is often mysterious, but there is usually a sexual tension between her and the hero. The male hero often has the potential of a relationship with her, and often that relationship threatens the hero's social position. She is often in a position to help or hurt the protagonist, and often the plot could turn on her decisions. The noir female lead has enough positive personal attributes to be a worthy mate to the male hero, but just as he is usually denied high status for his altruism, he is usually denied the valued relationship. Indeed, it has been argued that the noir films of the late 1940s play out the conflict between American women who had had jobs in the wartime economy and the returning veterans who wanted those state-side jobs. So the male noir hero and the female lead can in fact be enemies.

The noir hero has many qualities that would make him or her deserving of high status and reproductive success, but because that status and success are lacking, he or she awakens in the reader a sense of indignation over the injustice. That indignation generates loyalty in the reader. The hero may have a character flaw that prevents success. Perhaps success in the social order requires a certain level of hypocrisy in which he or she refuses to participate. The hero's mix of cynicism and idealism speaks to the reader who may also be unsucessful in the competition for worldly status. The male hero's relationship to women is not a clear-cut one of patriarchal dominance.

In this particular novel, Chabon weaves an alternative history of the late 20th century. Jewish Zionists had failed to establish and maintain Israel. Landsman is a man who has failed in his marriage to a worthy woman, and he has lost his close sister. He is abusing alcohol to assuage his pain. Many of his sufferings are self-inflicted. But his willingness to ignore social convention and do what he thinks is right allows him to break through the cabalistic social order around him. His ex-wife is the female noir lead, and she is in the end loyal to him and that loyalty allows her to see that he was right after all. Chabon reworks the noir genre to represent the situation of this imagined Jewish social order and more broadly the human condition. We are flawed, we seek redemption, but we should expose the arrogance of those who think they can trigger the apocalyptic coming of the Messiah.

The power of the noir hero is his willingness to discover the truth no matter the consequences, and in the long run, the truth is what will allow the social order to be perpetuated. Our respect for the hero's willingness to throw away immediate social status in pursuit of the truth is perhaps derived from an awareness that the deeper truth is what will ultimately succeed, so that rejection of the current social order is a high risk evolutionary strategy. It is a costly signal of altruism. That the hero often fails to reap the rewards of those efforts gives us a tragic sense of loyalty. Landsman has those features. An open question is: is he too hackneyed and predictable, or has Chabon given the story enough of a reinterpretation to be worthy of our interest beyond the immediate pleasure of the plot resolution?

Chabon via ELC2

ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives. In this text, Jewish identity is centered on belief in stories. Some of the characters are animated by stories about the rebuilding of Jerusalem and a Messiah. Both Landsman and his sidekick, Berko, struggle with the stories of their own past, trying to make sense of themselves through these stories. As TSA discusses, stories help build pro-social behavior, and the stories of messiah help hold together the jewish community. However, the heroic tale of the detective trumps that social union with the pro-social ideals of the open society, the ideals of striving for truth and exposing corruption.

As to the second point: the narrative struggles to to be a well-told tale. IMHO, it is a well-told tale. I was cheering for Landsman and his ragtag allies. Many man-on-the-street reviewers on Amazon did not care for the florid language. I will agree that no one would mistake this prose for Hemingway. Pynchon maybe, but not Hemingway.

Authors can try to aim their work at two (or more) different audiences. Here, fans of fantasy detective genre may enjoy the story at one level, students of the craft of Pynchon and Chabon may enjoy it at another level.

Chabon via ELC3

ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution. This text celebrates the integration of Jews within the broader culture and criticizes the fanaticism of messianic Jews. Berko bravely deals with his own multi-ethnicity. Landsman strives to uphold an open society that follows the rule of law, damn the torpedos.

"In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy."@en